The prisoners heard him cry out once in his sleep at night: “Hold him, hold him! Cut his head off, his head, his head!…”
Almost all the prisoners talked and raved in their sleep. Curses, thieves’ jargon, knives, axes most often came from their mouths when they raved. “We’re beaten folk,” they used to say, “we’re all beaten up inside; that’s why we shout in our sleep.”
Government-imposed forced labor was a duty, not an occupation: the prisoner finished his assignment or served his allotted hours of work and went back to prison. The work was looked upon with hatred. Without his own special, personal occupation, to which he was committed with all his mind, with all his reckoning, a man could not live in prison. And how, then, could all these people, intelligent, having lived intensely and wishing to live, forcibly heaped together in this place, forcibly torn away from society and normal life, have a normal and regular life here, by their own will and inclination? From idleness alone, such criminal qualities would develop in a man here as he had no notion of before. Without work, and without lawful, normal property, a man cannot live, he becomes depraved, he turns into a brute. And therefore each person in prison, owing to natural need and some sense of self-preservation, had his own craft and occupation. The long summer days were almost entirely taken up with government work; in the short nights there was barely enough time for sleep. But in winter the prisoners, according to the rules, had to be locked up as soon as it got dark. What is there to do during the long, dull hours of a winter evening? And therefore almost every barrack, despite the prohibition, turned into an enormous workshop. Work itself, being occupied, was not forbidden; but it was strictly forbidden to have tools with you in prison, and without them work was impossible. But people worked on the quiet, and it seems the authorities, in some cases, did not look into it very closely. Many of the convicts came to the prison knowing nothing, but they learned from others and later went out into freedom as good craftsmen. There were bootmakers, and shoemakers, and tailors, and cabinetmakers, and locksmiths, and woodcarvers, and gilders. There was a Jew, Isai Bumstein, a jeweler, who was also a moneylender. They all worked and earned their two cents. Orders for work came from town. Money is minted freedom, and therefore, for a man completely deprived of freedom, it is ten times dearer. Just to have it jingling in his pocket half comforts him, even if he cannot spend it. But money can be spent always and everywhere, the more so as forbidden fruit is twice sweeter. And in prison you could even get hold of vodka. Pipes were strictly forbidden, but everybody smoked them. Money and tobacco saved them from scurvy and other diseases. Work saved them from crime: without work the prisoners would have devoured each other like spiders in a jar. In spite of which, both work and money were forbidden. Surprise searches were often carried out at night, everything forbidden was confiscated, and well hidden as the money was, it still sometimes ended up in the searchers’ hands. That was partly why it was not saved, but quickly spent on drink; that was why vodka also found its way into the prison. After each search, the guilty ones, besides being deprived of all their property, would most often be painfully punished. But, after each search, the losses were quickly replenished, new things were obtained at once, and everything went on as before. The authorities knew that, and the prisoners did not murmur against the punishments, though such a life was like setting up house on Mount Vesuvius.
Those who had no craft went into other kinds of business. There were rather original ways. Some, for instance, went into secondhand dealing, and sometimes sold such things as it would never occur to people outside prison walls not only to buy and sell, but even to consider as things. But the prison was very poor and the trade was brisk. The least rag had value and was good for something. From poverty, money also acquired a totally different value in prison than outside it. A big and complicated piece of work was paid for in pennies. Some even made a success of moneylending. An indebted or bankrupt prisoner would take his last possessions to the moneylender, to get a few copper coins from him at frightful interest. If he did not redeem the things in time, they would be sold without delay and without mercy. Moneylending flourished so much that even government-issued things—government linens, footwear, things necessary to every prisoner at every moment—were accepted as pledges. But in the case of such pledges, matters could take a different, though not entirely unexpected, turn: the man who left the pledge and got the money would go at once, without another word, to the senior sergeant, the man immediately in charge of the prison, and report the pledging of government things, and they would at once be taken away from the moneylender, without even informing the higher authorities. Curiously enough, there was sometimes even no quarrel involved: the moneylender would silently and sullenly return what he had to, as if he had even expected it to turn out that way. Maybe he could not help admitting to himself that in the pledger’s place he would have done the same. And therefore, if he did curse afterwards, it was without any malice, just so, to clear his conscience.
Generally, they all stole terribly from each other. Almost everybody had his own chest with a lock for keeping government things. This was permitted; but the chests were no salvation. I suppose one can imagine what skillful thieves we had there. One prisoner, a man sincerely devoted to me (I say that without any exaggeration), stole my Bible, the only book we were allowed to have in prison. He confessed it to me the same day, not out of repentance, but out of pity for me, because I spent so long looking for it. There were people who sold vodka and quickly became rich. I will tell about that trade separately sometime; it is quite remarkable. There were many who wound up in prison for smuggling, and therefore it is no surprise that, despite the searches and guards, vodka was brought into the prison that way. Incidentally, smuggling is by nature a special sort of crime. Can you imagine, for instance, that for some smugglers money, profit, plays a secondary role, that it does not come foremost? And yet it is sometimes precisely so. A smuggler works by passion, by vocation. He is something of a poet. He risks all, faces terrible danger, dodges, invents, extricates himself; he sometimes even acts by a sort of inspiration. It is a passion as strong as card-playing. I knew a certain inmate in prison, externally of colossal dimensions, but so meek, quiet, humble, that it was impossible to imagine how he ended up in prison. He was so mild and easy to get along with that in all his time in prison he never quarreled with anybody. But he was from the western border, got put away for smuggling, and, naturally, could not help himself and started running vodka. So many times he was punished for it, and how afraid he was of the rod! And this running of vodka brought him a most negligible income. Only the entrepreneur got rich from it. The odd fellow loved art for art’s sake. He was tearful as an old woman, and so many times, after being punished, he would promise and swear to give up smuggling. He would control himself manfully, sometimes for a whole month, but in the end he still could not keep away from it … Thanks to such persons, there was no lack of vodka in prison.
Finally, there was another source of income, which, while it did not make the prisoners rich, was constant and beneficial. This was almsgiving. The upper class of our society has no idea how merchants, tradesmen, and all our people care for the “unfortunate.” The almsgiving is almost continuous, and almost always in the form of bread, rolls, and kalachi,3 far more seldom in money. Without these alms, in many places prisoners, especially those awaiting trial, who are kept much more strictly than those who have been sentenced, would have a hard time of it. The alms are religiously shared out among the prisoners. If there is not enough to go around, the rolls are cut into equal parts, sometimes even as many as six parts, so that each prisoner is sure to get his piece. I remember the first time I was given alms in money. It was soon after my arrival in prison. I was coming back from the morning’s work alone, with a convoy soldier. I crossed paths with a mother and her daughter, a girl of about ten, pretty as a little angel. I had already seen them once. The mother was a soldier’s wife, a widow. Her husband, a young soldier, had been on trial and had di
ed in the prisoners’ ward of the hospital while I, too, was lying sick there. His wife and daughter came to take leave of him; they both wept terribly. When she saw me, the girl blushed and whispered something to her mother; the mother stopped at once, rummaged in her purse for a quarter kopeck, and gave it to the girl. The girl rushed after me … “Here ‘unfortunate,’ take a little kopeck for Christ’s sake,” she cried, running ahead of me and putting the coin in my hand. I took her little kopeck, and the girl went back to her mother perfectly content. I held on to that little kopeck for a long time.
II
First Impressions
The first month and generally the beginning of my life in prison are vividly present now in my imagination. My subsequent prison years flit through my memory much more dimly. Some seem completely effaced, merged together, leaving a single overall impression: heavy, monotonous, stifling.
But everything I experienced in the first days of my hard labor stands before me now as if it happened yesterday. And so it should be.
I clearly remember that, when I first stepped into that life, I was struck that I seemed to find nothing especially striking, unusual, or, better to say, unexpected in it. It all seemed to have flashed by me before in my imagination when, on my way to Siberia, I tried to figure out my destiny ahead of time. But soon a huge number of the strangest surprises, of the most monstrous facts, began to stop me at almost every step. And only later on, after living in prison for quite a long time, did I fully comprehend all the exclusiveness, all the unexpectedness of such an existence, and I marveled at it more and more. I confess that this astonishment accompanied me throughout my long term at hard labor; I could never be reconciled to it.
My first general impression on entering prison was extremely repulsive; but despite that—strangely!—it seemed to me that it was much easier to live in prison than I had imagined on the way there. Though the prisoners were in fetters, they walked freely about the whole prison, swore, sang songs, did their own work, smoked pipes, and even drank vodka (at least a few did), and at night some got down to playing cards. The labor itself, for instance, did not seem to me so very punishing, so hard, and only much later did I realize that the punishment and hardness of this labor lay not so much in its difficulty and ceaselessness as in its being forced, imposed, under the lash. In freedom a peasant most likely works incomparably more, sometimes even at night, especially in summer; but he works for himself, works with a reasonable purpose, and it is incomparably easier for him than for a convict doing forced labor that is totally useless to him. It occurred to me once that if they wanted to crush, to annihilate a man totally, to punish him with the most terrible punishment, so that the most dreadful murderer would shudder at this punishment and be frightened of it beforehand, they would only need to give the labor a character of complete, total uselessness and meaninglessness. If present-day hard labor is uninteresting and boring for the convict, it is still reasonable in itself, as labor: the prisoner makes bricks, digs the earth, plasters, builds; there is meaning and purpose. The worker sometimes even gets carried away by it, wants to do it better, more quickly, more skillfully. But if he were forced, for instance, to pour water from one tub into another and from the other into the first, to grind sand, to carry a pile of dirt from one place to another and back again—I think the prisoner would hang himself after a few days, or commit a thousand crimes, to die rather than endure such humiliation, shame, and torment. To be sure, such a punishment would turn into torture, revenge, and would be meaningless, because it would achieve no reasonable purpose. But since a portion of that torture, meaninglessness, humiliation, and shame is unfailingly present in any labor that is forced, hard labor is incomparably more tormenting than any free labor, precisely for being forced.
However, I came to prison in the winter, in December, and had no idea yet of the summer work, which was five times more difficult. In winter there was generally little government work in our fortress. The prisoners went to the Irtysh1 to break up old government barges, worked in workshops, shoveled snow around government buildings after blizzards, baked and crushed alabaster, and so on and so forth. The winter day was short, the work was soon done, and our people all returned to prison early, where there was almost nothing for them to do, if they did not happen to have some work of their own. But maybe only a third of the prisoners were busy with their own work; the rest twiddled their thumbs, sauntered aimlessly around all the barracks, cursed, schemed and plotted among themselves, got drunk if some money turned up, at night gambled away their last shirt at cards—and all that from anguish, from idleness, from having nothing to do. Later I understood that, besides the lack of freedom, besides the forced labor, there was one more torment in prison life that was almost worse than all the others. This was forced communal cohabitation. Of course, there is also communal cohabitation in other places; but not everybody would want to live with the sort of people that wind up in prison, and I am sure that every convict felt that torment, though, of course, for the most part unconsciously.
The food also seemed quite sufficient to me. The prisoners insisted that there was nothing like it in the penal companies of European Russia. Of that I cannot venture to judge: I have never been there. Besides that, many had the possibility of acquiring their own food. Beef cost half a kopeck a pound, in the summer three kopecks. But the only ones who could buy their own food were those who had a steady supply of money; the majority in the prison ate institutional food. However, when the prisoners praised their food, they were speaking only of the bread and blessing the fact that our bread was held in common, and not given out by weight. The latter horrified them: if it had been given out by weight, a third of them would have gone hungry; if collectively, everybody had enough. Our bread was somehow especially tasty and was famous all over town. This was ascribed to the fortunate construction of the prison ovens. The shchi,2 though, was very plain. It was cooked in a common cauldron, with the addition of a little grain, and, especially on weekdays, came out watery and thin. I was horrified by the enormous number of cockroaches in it. But the prisoners paid no attention to that.
The first three days I did not go to work, as was done with all newcomers: they were allowed to rest after the journey. But the next day I had to leave the prison to have my irons changed. My fetters were non-regulation, made of chain links, or “clinkers,” as the prisoners called them. They were worn over the clothes. The regulation prison fetters, adapted to work, were made not of rings but of four iron rods almost as thick as a finger, connected by three rings. They were worn under the trousers. A strap was fastened to the middle ring, and was in turn attached to the belt at the waist, which was worn immediately over the shirt.
I remember my first morning in the barrack. The drum in the guardhouse by the gate sounded reveille, and some ten minutes later the sergeant on duty began to unlock the barracks. People began to wake up. By the dim light of a cheap tallow candle prisoners, shivering with cold, got up from their bunks. Most of them were silent and sullen with sleep. They yawned, stretched, and wrinkled their branded foreheads. Some crossed themselves, others were already starting to squabble. It was terribly stuffy. Fresh winter air burst through the door the moment it was opened, and billows of steam raced around the barrack. The prisoners crowded around the water buckets; they took the dipper by turns, filled their mouths with water, and washed their hands and faces with it. The water was prepared the evening before by the slop man. According to the rules, each barrack had a prisoner elected by the whole group to serve in the barrack. He was called the slop man, and he did not go out to work. He was charged with seeing to the cleanliness of the barrack, with washing and scrubbing the bunks and the floors, with bringing in and taking out the slop pail, and with providing fresh water in two buckets—for washing in the morning and drinking during the day. Over the dipper, of which there was only one, quarreling broke out immediately.
“Where’re you sticking yourself, brand-head!” growled a tall, sullen prisoner, lean and sw
arthy, with some strange bulges on his shaven skull, shoving another one, fat and squat, with a merry and ruddy face. “Stay put!”
“What’re you shouting about! If you stay, you pay! Get lost! Look at this elongated monument! Not a drop of hetiquettanity in the man, brothers!”
“Hetiquettanity” produced a certain effect: many laughed. That was all the merry fat man needed. He was obviously a sort of volunteer buffoon in the barrack. The tall prisoner looked at him with the profoundest contempt.
Notes from a Dead House Page 4